We truly live in a golden age of television and Showtime’s new series The Loudest Voice is more proof that Hollywood’s biggest stars are no longer afraid to do TV projects. Russell Crowe stars as Fox News founder Roger Ailes in a limited-series that chronicles the last decade of his life.
Based on the bestselling book The Loudest Voice In The Room by Gabriel Sherman, the series stars Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Crowe (Gladiator); Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) as Gretchen Carlson, Sienna Miller (Layer Cake) plays NBC news producer Elizabeth Ailes; Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) portrays Brian Lewis; and Simon McBurney (The Theory Of Everything) is creepy Rupert Murdoch.
In our own era with its politically charged media, no figure is more influential, even dead, than Ailes, who made Fox News into a force that bred the rise of Trumpism. As Chairman and CEO of Fox News and Fox Television Stations, Ailes forever changed how we look at how America governs. If you have forgotten, Ailes resigned from Fox in July 2016 after allegations of sexual harassment came forward. Ailes helped Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush manage their image in the media and aided in professional liar Rudy Giuliani‘s first mayoral campaign. In 2016, he became an adviser to the Trump campaign, where he assisted with debate preparation.
The Loudest Voice focuses primarily on the past decade in which Ailes became the Republican Party’s de facto leader, but it also jumps to the past showing the time that Ailes met Nixon on the set of The Mike Douglas Show, a moment that sparked Ailes’ political career.
Sherman co-wrote the series with Oscar-winner Tom McCarthy (Spotlight). Sherman interviewed more than 600 people for his book The Loudest Voice In The Room.
Crowe is a producer on the series and Emmy Award-nominee Kari Skogland (The Handmaid’s Tale) directed the first two episodes and serves as executive producer.
In the trailer, Crowe, as Ailes says:
Here in America, television news is king We’re gonna give them a vision of the world the way they want it to be.
The Loudest Voice begins airing on Sunday, June 30, at 10 p.m. on Showtime.
It is not the only Roger Ailes project. Fair And Balanced is a film directed by Jay Roach, whose credits include the Emmy-winning HBO film Recount (2008) which earned Roach two Emmy Awards. He also directed the HBO film Game Change (2012) about the 2008 McCain/Palin campaign, one of the most watched films in HBO history.
Fair And Balanced has John Lithgow as Ailes and features Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, Connie Britton as Elizabeth Ailes, Malcolm McDowell as Murdoch, plus Margot Robbie and Allison Janney, and Kate McKinnon. It opens December 20th, in time for Oscar consideration.
Here is the just released trailer for The Loudest Voice:
